We should keep our eyes on “real” unemployment numbers as people will no disposable income have no purchasing power and have to sell assets at a discount to survive….

Taking this to its logical conclusion, in a debt financed and jobless recovery, we will be in for a rude awakening with massive social problems on our hands in the absence of a safety net in the country.

The most immediate impact will be on the young people due to enter the work force, having accumulated heavy debt burden to get a college education, and on their families obliged to extend their home stay/pay.

The dynamic of the world we’re in is more, worse, faster, bigger, etc. It is not a surprise to see the “recession” fit this mode. The unprecedented magnitude of the knee-jerk Fed-Washington shotgun response may be exaggerated in its effects too, but I suspect the eventual bigger badder results will be on the inflation side (sooner).

This just makes clear how messed up the economy was in in 2008. Obama gets credit for massive fiscal policy which blunted the decline. Bush gets credit for getting out of the way since he was intellectually incapable of similar action. I guess Keynes gets some credit, too.

not exactly on topic but I wanted to note to you that your column of last Friday (in the Int. Herald Trib) explained, for the first time I have seen it, the real reason for the salary/bonus conflict on Wall St. I never realized before (and I have not read in a lot of reading on the topic since the recession started) that there were federal limits to the amount of salary that could be paid. And the bonus is a way to make up for this by, in essence, giving bigger salaries. That makes sense and explains why the banks can´t just increase the salary portion of the compensation package.
I don´t think other people understand this either, and I think the media could do a much better job of explaining how and why this works the way it does.

I was damn sure that everyone stockpiling Chinese made AK47s and AMMUNITION, buying mail order CHICKENS for their suburban back yard for eggs, and buying GARDEN SEED for gardens, would have hugely raised the GDP by now.

And all this talk about banks and stocks — the real money is in guns. Did you know that AK47s and their ammunition have more than doubled in value since January ? A hundred per cent return on investment in 6 months ! Better than GE !

ivan – how would importing AK47s from china help with american GDP? Or is it just a hoarding game with no new imports being added? What you’d need would be cheaper American copies of the Chinese clones of the AK47. Or maybe they could improve the materials – carbon fibre stocks, maybe gold-plated metalwork, …

“how would importing AK47s from china help with american GDP? “. Well, duh …

A Chinese AK47 costs $750 to import, but a single American funeral averages $15000 and as most gun shot victims utilize emergency rooms (the most expensive form of health care in a country of ridiculously expensive health care), that would mean:

Provided that there is at least one funeral and 3 survivors per one consignment of 50 AK47s, this would be a net positive for American GDP.

You will be forgiven for not understanding this as you live in a country with strict gun control laws.

Do you know any British Nurses who have been brainwashed watching “Dallas” re-runs who want to come over and work in Dallas emergency rooms ? We could use them.

The good stuff, full metal jacket, high velocity military grade stuff which is preferred by your average gang member, is usually Russian.

Your average American high school kid on an allowance would use the cheaper American stuff.

That said, it is a point of national pride that America manufactures the high penetration, teflon coated versions commonly known as “cop killer bullets” which are preferred by your average psycopathic drug user/former mental patient high on crystal meth.

In the past 30 years, the US manufacturing has been gutted and transported to China, as “Strong Dollar” policy has allowed the successive US Governments to mask the real inflation effect in the country as the Chinese slave labor was willing to work for nothing (the UK had experienced this a few decades earlier)….

On top of this, we have managed to pile up astronomical trade and budget deficits with impunity and without any sense of accountability….

Now both the US and the UK are stuck in similar debt traps and everyday that I read the news, both governments are throwing billions of dollars of borrowed “new cash” at some emergency to calm the nerves down….

All these figures are meaningless as trillions of dollars/pounds of debt and trade imbalances are testaments to the failure of the unholy alliance between the “freedom loving western politician” and the “market loving money worshiping capitalists” who collectively have mortgaged the future of the western democracies to the dictators, despots and the communists for the next several generations as is so cleverly depicted on the cover of the Economist Magazine and that by the time the reality hits the fan, most of these politicians and the pseudo market economy cheerleaders have all been buried ten feet deep in their 7’X5′ luxurious eternal real estate.

I enjoy reading your comments, but you consistently ignore the fact that a country whose currency is a reserve currency cannot fall into a debt trap because it can always print money, which by the way, we are doing “like there is no tomorrow”.

It is China which needs to worry that we are going to turn their treasure of US denominated treasures into something they can line their bird cages with. Those Chinese are going to wake up one day and find out they worked for nothing and the joke was on them.

Of course we should borrow money from the nitwit Chinese and then pay it back some day with something worth crap ! Just like we should drill the world’s oil and leave ours in the ground getting more valuable by the day.

Seriously, do what I do — put your money into stuff they can’t make any more of — arable land, 18th and 19th century artwork, etc., then chill out and take a vacation.

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Economics doesn't have to be complicated. It is the study of our lives — our jobs, our homes, our families and the little decisions we face every day. Here at Economix, journalists and economists analyze the news and use economics as a framework for thinking about the world. We welcome feedback, at economix@nytimes.com.